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  • Exploratory Void Machine: Starting Again

    No Man’s Sky, April 2023

    April 2023

    I’ve started a new game of NMS a couple of times. I first set forth with the PC version at launch, later moving to Playstation, spinning up a game on Switch when it launched there and now with having an Xbox in the house, starting a game up there too. This is the slowest I’ve taken it though.

    Certainly with the Switch version, I had pretty much everything I needed up and running in the space of a fortnight – money, farms, bases, the works. Not so this time. Partly, I’m exhausted a lot at the moment – effort is hard – and partly it’s that I’m just not in a rush. I’m here more to tootle around and take pictures, the gamey bits I can fit in-between.

    I’ll confess I used a combination of Twitch rewards and the last expedition to get out the gates a wee bit faster, ensuring I didn’t have to exert too much effort on the basics. Sure, everything is a lot smoother and a lot easier now than the few times I’ve gone from the top, still.. after 7 years I can’t say I’m especially arsed with the early game acquisition part. Now, I know I could just start in creative mode and have everything in place at the start of the game but I need some degree of friction for the times where aimless wandering isn’t doing it for me.

    Not a lot, just some.

    So progress is pretty slow and so far, I’ve only visited a handful of star systems and pretty much all of those haven’t been too far from the one the expedition dumped me in.

    I’m loving the extra fidelity this latest gen version of the game brings though, especially where the grass is concerned.

    In previous gen versions, the grass would be really dense and gorgeous up close but a very, very short distance away it would kinda just stop leaving a bald landscape that matched the colour of the grass. Perfectly fine when you’re playing the game and everything is moving, less ideal for photo mode.

    This is an old PS4 Pro shot where you can see the grass gradually disappearing the further from the camera you look.

    (Obviously I understand the reasons for this and it’s cool, you can’t blame me for wishing it didn’t have to be the case though!)

    Well, with the latest gen it’s no longer a problem. The grass is thick, dense and visible into the distance at pretty much all times. Now, the grass has always been one of my favourite things in the game since launch and now it gets to look incredible in static shots as well as whilst playing. It’s fantastic and I’m a very happy Rob with it.

    Big pics from this month’s adventures after the cut.

    (more…)

  • Read: What Videogames Did To Haunting, Nate Schmidt (Unwinnable)

    When they are talked about at all, haunted videogames are almost always retro and retroactive. Electric media was haunted from the beginning, so now that our most popular forms of communication and entertainment are electrical, why aren’t there more hauntings?

    Nate Schmidt For Unwinnable

    From this month’s Unwinnable mag, a lovely essay asking why it’s never new videogames that are haunted (Minecraft being an obvious exception) and also, a possible theory as to why.

    There’s an extract up on the site, you’ll need either a sub or a copy of the mag to read the whole piece – something I heartily recommend as in all my (now many) years of subbing to Unwinnable, it’s never managed an issue I haven’t enjoyed yet.

    I’ve long maintained that if the time comes where I need to cut down on subs (very possible given living in the UK at the mo is increasingly unaffordable for normal people who like things like warm houses and eating food to live) then Unwinnable and Fallen London will be the last to go. So far, nothing has changed my mind on that one, only reinforced my opinion.

    Unwinnable | creating Cultural Criticism | Patreon
    Become a patron of Unwinnable today: Get access to exclusive content and experiences on the world’s largest membership platform for artists and creators.
    www.patreon.com

  • Look At It! Into The Pit (Nullpointer Games)

    Realised yesterday that now we have one of those new fangled Xbox things in the house I can finally play Into The Pit on a big television. Best decision I’ve made all week because gosh, what a stunning looking videogame it is.

    Absolutely criminally overlooked game too. Perhaps there just aren’t that many people looking for a videogame that mashes up a 1950’s/60’s gothic horror village set aesthetic with 1980’s thrash metal album covers, throws in the most wonderful glow, splatter and Bava-esque coloured lighting and finishes it all off by pushing it through the most intense pixellated rendering, looking like a modern successor to your Quake and Thief games (albeit via a path not taken by reality).

    It’s fucking catnip to me though! Bloody hell, talk about hitting all the right spots.

    It’s just such a vibe! Revisiting it for the first time in a year or so, now in big-screen-o-vision, I found myself getting killed way more often than I should have been because I was just far too busy gawping at the spectacle. The glow, the lights, the shimmer, the levels caught between chunky 90’s videogame and pulpy film set and the way everything moves and explodes and oh, look, it’s really something.

    One of my favourite aesthetics in recent years for the sheer pride it takes in wearing its multitude of inspirations on its sleeve and yet still there’s a game that looks like nothing else that exists.

    I’m honestly not really a fan of a bunch of the recent FPS revival games (Cruelty Squad and Prodeus being the only ones that hit the spot), most of them either don’t vibe right or just look like a game I’d have skipped had it been released in the era it purports to pay tribute to.


    And sure, I’d have probably loved Into The Pit even more as a campaign FPS rather than the roguelike it is – the thought of a Quake that looks like this is an exciting one – but you know, I’ll take this as it is all the same because it’s a stunner.

    Into the Pit – Humble Games | Retro FPS Roguelike
    A fast-paced retro-FPS roguelite! As a member of a family of lore-hunting mystics you are summoned to a cursed village, drawn by rumors of a demonic portal.
    www.humblegames.com

You are reading Rob’s Punching Robots Club

The online home of Rob Fearon, disabled videogame maker, games journalist, crap film watcher, gobshite and doodler. Rob’s been around games a very, very long time now and Punching Robots Club is their personal blog featuring whatever nonsense takes their fancy.

Sometimes it’s a sketch, a review, an article about videogames, a pointer to something Rob finds cool. Whatever, really. Expect anything, Rob’s tired of being a brand online and so it’s just stuff and things these days. Nice stuff and things, mind you.

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